The Al-Andalus Quartet: Part Four

THE AL-ANDALUS QUARTET: PART FOUR ALMERÍA / UMM AL-MARIYA 2007 AD / 1427 AH The traveler who journeys to the City of Almería arrives at a port where the routes of the ferries, the whitecaps and waves, the salt-leaden gusts in the searing white heat, the sculptures of dolphins manifested at play on the boulevard perpendicular to the sterns of great ships, reveal windows and mirrors in which every reflection is a perplexing distortion, generating questions impossible to answer with the images at hand Ciudad Almería is Umm Al-Mariya, A city with barrios named Al-Musalá, Al-Medina, Al-Haud, where visionary souls at the College of Architects draw invisible lines from the markets of Fez the minarets of Essaouira to the courtyards and gardens of an Andalusia making paradise landscapes of red tiles and roses, wrought-iron and jasmine, and burbling fountains as seductive as the curvature of Arabic script; where every dark eye under every headscarf, under every skull cap, beneath flat-brimmed sombreros and every dark curl blowing free in the breezes between mountains and sea, sees only itself colored café con leche, burned walnut by sunlight, yet never identical to the likenesses imagined when they think of themselves; and where luminous women with irresistible smiles think in African tongues and laugh loudly in public, look you straight in the eye and in their accented Spanish offer no explanation for the browning of Spain The intelligent observer see ships every day link Morocco and Algeria with Al-Andalus, their sleek silhouettes mimic seabirds and dolphins, their windows and lights and the curves of their hulls a mosaic of facets which, distorted by water, make city and the sea seem a shimmering collage taunting resident and visitor with fragmented images of who he once was and who she might become, but never an inkling of who they are now! Emanuel Carter